I’ve long been curious about the trio of little houses behind the Mary Jane Taylor Sutzer house in the 500 block of East Nash Street. In an interview a few months ago, Samuel C. Lathan mentioned them:

Lathan: … And Rev. [Russell B.] Taylor had an orchard.

Henderson: Oh, okay.

Lathan: Back there where those houses at down Nash Street.

Henderson: Okay. Back behind?

Lathan: Yeah, it was an orchard back there. …

Not long after, I noticed a little notation in a margin of the 1940 census of Wilson. Listed adjacent to the Taylor household were the three households of  … Taylor’s Alley.

Here they are yesterday morning:

Per description in the nomination form for Wilson Central Business-Tobacco Warehouse Historic District, Sutzer purchased the house on the left from Alfred Robinson prior to building her own house in 1915. The two dwellings on the right are described as “small, four-bay by one-bay, two-room bungaloid houses.”

A little further west on the 500 block of East Nash, the census records another alley, Gilliam’s, with a duplex.

The 1930 Sanborn fire insurance map of Wilson reveals Gilliam’s Alley as the tiny space running from Nash Street between Dr. Matthew S. Gilliam‘s medical office and the Orange Hotel. (Of the buildings shown below, only the Orange still stands.)

Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, October 2025.